Updates makes Mac Mini slow

Question

Hello,
After I installed the Sept. 15th updates, and the new itunes 8 updates, my mini is slow to restart. it takes almost 5 mins to restart. 1st comes a grey screen, then a light blue screen, and just sits there before the login screen finally comes up, i can walk away and do some stuff and walk back to the mini, then it would be at the login screen. This is one reason why i went with a Mac, since I am sick of waiting for winblows to boot.
Also, the itunes 8 sometimes will not respond, i click on it in the dock, and it will not open , i check the activity monitor and it will let me force quit, but the application still has the little blue light under it on the dock. If i right click on it it says: application is not responsive", i can click force quit all day till i'm blue in the face, but only a restart will fix it. But then i have to go through the long restart process. Those are the only 2 issues i have, everything else works fine. I'm still new to the Mac world, so I am wondering how to get this fixed.

Answer 1

Neither of the issues you are describing here are common ones, so while they are frustrating, particularly having come from a Windows system in the hope of avoiding such problems, they can be resolved!
In themselves, it's very rare that updates cause these kind of issues, and having reviewed the comments made after the security and iTunes updates, I don't think either of these is responsible for the problems you have - at least not directly. What is more likely is that the updates have either not correctly installed, or that one or other has brought an existing problem to the surface.
The first thing I would do in terms of the slow bootup is to check that you have the internal drive selected in the Startup Disk preference pane. If it is not selected, what will typically happen is that the system will pause at startup, and search all available sources for a suitable boot volume, including interrogating any and all network connections, even though the internal drive is an obvious candidate. Eventually, when it can only find the internal drive, it selects it and boots. Open system preferences (the gear-cog icon in the dock or via the Apple menu) and select Startup Disk. Click the internal drive icon, and then restart.
If that doesn't help, the next thing I would do in this situation is a bit of common housekeeping. This isn't something Macs need very often, but when things go wrong it can be useful in order to remove some possible causes and also ensure the system is nice and clean! Download a copy of YASU from http://jimmitchelldesign.com/projects/yasu/ and set it to perform all tasks. Don't run any other application while YASU is running, and let the system reboot when it's done. There are several things this software does, including trimming log files which can become cumbersome, resetting cache files which can corrupt and cause behavior and stability problems, repair disk permissions which can cause applications, MacOS components or files to fail to open, and update prebinding, which ensures that applications and their library files are correctly linked.
The reboot after running YASU will be slower than usual and the system will run slowly for a short time as it rebuilds new cache files, but it should help. If it doesn't resolve the issues, it will at least then remove a number of possible causes, and help narrow the focus a little.
One other point - you do need to keep a little spare unused space on the hard drive for MacOS to work with. If you are running out of free space, the system will increasingly slow down.